My daily readings 10/08/2010

This is awesome. We use diigo right now for tagging pages and sharing them but it is pretty weak. The ability to login & keep a history of your markups to share with others in your group would be tops.

Xmarks might not be quite dead yet but it probably will and should be.

They seem really attached to the idea that the data (or as they ponderously call it, ‘the corpus’) they have is very valuable. $9 million (with an impressive $2 mil/year burn rate) later they haven’t figured out a way to extract any of that elusive value.

Browser bookmark sync is becoming a built-in feature in many popular browsers. Cross-browser support is an edge case that overlaps with the functionality of a number of web-based bookmarking services which generally offer a richer and more useful feature set than in-browser bookmarking.

In the period of about a week they’ve persuaded fewer than 30k of their users to maybe pay them $10/yr. This is probably not all that surprising given the above and the fact they’ve already announced that should they run into difficulties, they’ll simply give up. Short of Stockholm Syndrome, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose to rely on their service going forward, even if someone is foolish enough to buy them out.

I love pinboard.in – I signed up when they were charging about $1 per signup and it works perfectly for me, the guy that runs it even setup a feature on my request and within about 24 hours of me requesting it! (tag specific user RSS feeds).

I like to be able to use whatever browser I want, whenever I want, use the browser’s native bookmarking, and have new bookmarks show up in whatever browser I run next (not to mention show up on iOS Safari).

Bookmark something in Chrome, leave my desk, check the bookmark on the iPad. Surf on the iPad on the train, bookmark some things, review those bookmarks in Firefox on the PC.

The built-in bookmark syncs don’t do this, unless you’re willing to only use a single browser on everything.

Xmarks does this. If you’re a developer using multiple browsers, seems like Xmarks would be essential kit.